Eustass Kid’s Bounty at 315,000,000 Berries

Eleven wanted notices above a hundred million landed on Sabaody Archipelago in the same month, and this one sat on top of the pile. The ranking is not the interesting part. The stated reason is. What weighed heaviest in putting Kid above the other ten, Luffy included, was the number of civilians killed along his route.

That reason is worth pausing on, because it is a rare one. Most bounties here are paying for a victory, a theft, an escape or a piece of knowledge. This one pays first of all for collateral damage, which is to say for precisely the thing Kid was never trying to achieve. His crew flattened towns over trivial provocations, and the Navy converted that mess into a number without having to credit him with a single accomplishment. Kid supplied the explanation himself on his way off the archipelago: all the way up the Grand Line people had laughed whenever he said he was going for the One Piece, and every time, he had killed everyone who laughed.

What he did with the poster on the day it mattered was not caution. He stayed on his feet while Silvers Rayleigh's Conqueror's Haki dropped almost the entire auction hall. Then he walked outside and tore through the Marine squad ringing the building, alongside two men he already regarded as rivals. He had offered to clear the road on his own, as a parting gift to the Straw Hats and the Heart Pirates, and both Luffy and Trafalgar Law took the offer as an insult. He got clear of a Pacifista, then of Kizaru, and left announcing that he would be King of the Pirates.

So the largest amount in his generation sailed off that week on a man known mainly for his wreckage. What Sabaody showed is that there was somebody behind it as well.